A Prayer Huddle is Not Enough
It would be nice to believe that praying would be enough to end
racism, but it won't be. Since that was all McCartney had to offer in his
thinly disguised "anti-racism" rally, the rest of us will have to keep
working. Work is what it takes.
We could start with Bill McCartney's description of the U.S. as a
"racial powder keg." Does the description of race relations as violent, as
his phrase suggests, help to defeat racism? Or does it just perpetuate
stereotypes about people of color?
Something the media has given very little attention to is the
racist agenda of Colorado for Family Values and other fundamentalist
organizations around the state. Bill McCartney, one of the chief
spokespeople for CFV, has affiliated himself with an organization that is
pursuing a racist agenda.
Colorado for Family Values has publicly declared that it intends to
remove all civil rights legislation in the state. And they've done pretty
well, under various guises, including English Only and Amendment 2. Kevin
Tebedo, another spokesperson for "family values," and the Tebedo family,
spearheaded the English Only campaign, a bigoted and mean-spirited attack
on Colorado's Chicano and Latino populations, as well as on other Colorado
citizens who speak languages other than English.
CFV and Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs have said that
Native-Americans teach their children "voodoo" and "witchcraft," a
disgusting distortion of religions other than Christianity.
And the Eagle Forum, a racist and right-wing organization has gone
even farther, claiming that, "many years ago Christian pioneers who
settled the American West had to fight savage Indians. Missionaries were
sent to the Indians to civilize and Christianize them. Today the reverse
is true," they lament, "missionaries of these former cultures are being
sent via the public school to heathenize our children."
Colorado Springs Pastor, Bernard Kuiper, quoted in the Denver Post,
said, "It should be clear that in order to live a Christian life, any
Christian in any society must be able to discriminate, and you must be able
to hate, because that's what the Bible says." How different is this from
McCartney's litany about "abomination"? McCartney and company are
certainly quite adept at hate-rhetoric.
In Bill McCartney's video announcing his rally to churches, he only
mentions Mexican-Americans and African-Americans. What about the racist
attacks on other people of color, Asian-Americans, Arab-Americans, Puerto
Ricans, and others? Where do they fit? And nowhere, in Bill's promise
keeping rhetoric, do women fit, regardless of their color.
The national English Only movement was heavily populated with right
wing Christian fundamentalists and neo-Nazis. The national campaign was
directed by a fundamentalist Christian organization out of Virginia called
English First, a project of the Committee to Preserve the Family. Those
following the agenda of the right-wing know that all of these organizations
are linked and they share similar racist, homophobic, and sexist values.
I worked against English Only in both California and in Colorado
and against Amendment 2 and I consistently saw right-wing groups trying to
pit Asians-Americans against Chicanos, African-Americans against gays and
lesbians. In Florida, the English Only law has pitted Latinos against
(other) Christians, Black and white. This kind of divisiveness does
nothing to end racism and I fear it is exactly the tactic McCartney is
using, pitting Christian people of color against those who practice other
religions.
But what about real change? What about real work against racism?
People who work against racism know that real change means hiring people of
color, not firing Black coaches. It means acknowledging and encouraging
racial diversity beyond those who are on McCartney's football team. It
means paying attention to women, not sponsoring expensive workshops for
mostly white men who want to reclaim their "positions as spiritual Masters
of their homes."
It means accepting that not all football players are Christian and
not forcing them to pray to a god that is not theirs.
It means working aggressively to overturn the English Only
Amendment and Amendment 2, both of which threaten large numbers of people
of color. It means renouncing the racist attacks by Colorado for Family
Values and Focus on the Family on Native Americans, Jews, and on civil
rights legislation. It means working to ensure the maintenance of these
important civil rights protections across the state.
I sincerely hope that McCartney wants to work actively against
racism. I hope that he will begin within himself, I hope that he will look
at those around him who have endorsed racism and renounce that racist
history, I hope that he will look within his own office and work toward
making changes there, I hope that he will stop using his powerful position
to promote bigotry. But I'm not holding my breath. In the meantime, there
is much more to do than just pray. Jesus, activist that he was, would
certainly ask for more.
Jim Davis-Rosenthal
Jim Davis-Rosenthal
Academic Access Institute
Campus Box 184, Lower Norlin
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0184
(303) 492-1417
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